The audition process is basically a head-to-head competition against the other submitters. The powers that be must have liked me, because I got a first-round bye. Now, I’m counting on your help to get past Round 2.

Head over to this page and vote for my recap of Wife Swap! You have to sign up for a message board account, but you love me that much, don’t you? I thought so. Now get to it!

So I’m not cranking out thousands of words a day (I’m lucky if I get an hour a day to spend at it), but I am actually working. On projects. How about them italics? I rewrote a scene of a short story this morning, I have a feel-good family piece in the edit queue after that one’s done, and somewhere in there I’ll be getting back to the novel.

For awhile, I was waking up in the morning thinking “I have to do these writing prompts first thing so I can get warmed up.” And doing the prompts. And nothing else.

Before the writing prompts, it was “I have to write another blog post so I can attract legions of loyal fans who hang on my every word.”

Those things are all well and good, of course, but I have to write before I can justify writing about writing.

Oh, and I also have a special assignment for tonight. I should have more news about that within the week. Don’t touch that dial.

While you’re waiting — go follow copyhacker on Twitter, and send in some fugly web copy!

A couple of years ago, I started a site called Copyhacker with the intent of exposing awful web copy. (I posted it here as well, and I still have the badge in my sidebar.) It didn’t go far — perhaps because I emailed each target I found, and then decided that was a really annoying sales tactic.

The idea stuck with me, though, and today the Copyhacker is back. No silly sales tactics, just a place to post crappy copy and practice on it with my red pen. If you have a suggestion, email hackme at copyhacker dot com. Better yet, follow copyhacker on Twitter, and @reply with potential targets. Because who hasn’t seen garbage like this on a site somewhere?

Once again, many thanks to Bryan for the terrific styling and WordPress hackery.

How a character handles a given object can be immensely revealing. Briefly describe, as specifically as you can, how the following characters would handle a pencil:

• a harried middle aged librarian named Greta Hurleyburton

Wears one over each ear and is constantly sharpening them with old-school crank sharpener mounted on her desk

• an elderly lawyer named Gregory Wooster IV

Imports handcrafted koa wood pencils from Argentina and keeps them in a humidor on his desk. Uses special Amazon rubber eraser and sharpens with a pocketknife (he likes to whittle also)

• a ten year old boy named Bruce

gets the big fat sparkly ones in 20-packs for pencil fighting, and trades them for candy

• a purple-haired installation artist who signs her work “Ahn R Keyy”

Sticks pencils in the eyes and private parts of mannequins as a theme. Makes pencil pincushions out of dolls of certain political figures.

Another tantrum, sure enough. This one’s a doozy. The house shakes with the screaming. I pause in my dinner prep, trying to muster the intestinal fortitude necessary to ignore the assault on my ears. You know that chemical that causes the feeling of stress, the one I can’t think of right now because I’m too stressed out? Yeah, that one. I’m up to my eyeballs in it. What’s that crash from the vicinity of the living room? I run in to check. She threw her stuffed squid at the lamp and knocked it over. The lamp is fine, but the lampshade, the one that my wife found for $1.50 at Michaels and spent an hour painting dots on, is toast. The metal ring tore right out of the cheap paper shade material. I can’t wait to hear what she’s going to say about this. Not the toddler, the wife. The toddler is making her views clearly felt right now. As I wonder how the afternoon could get any worse, I realize that the new smell is that of my tortillas burning in the toaster oven.

Instead of wasting time wondering how close I came, I’m following a tip from screenwriter John August (via Daring Fireball): take a good piece and reverse engineer it. “Think of yourself as an ordinary mechanic given the task of reverse-engineering a spaceship,” he says. “Figure out what the pieces do, and why they were put together in that way.”

First Place

“Time travel works!” the note read. “However you can only travel to the past and one-way.” I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill. (Ron Gould)

This one has a perfect three-act structure. The first three words are a killer hook. The second sentence sets up the conflict, the third brings it home. It makes me wonder where the narrator found the note, and what happened to him or her — in the future, in the past, whenever. First through third place all made great use of the last-sentence twist.

Second Place

Tony was a snitch, so I wasn’t surprised when his torso turned up in the river. What did surprise me, though, was where they found his head. (Anthony Juliano)

“Tony was a snitch” — again with the hook. You know exactly what’s coming when you read those four words. But you want to know who had Tony whacked and, of course, where they found that head. Also, what’s the narrator’s relationship to Tony? I believe someone commented that this one would make a great novel opener.

Third Place

When Gibson hit that homerun in the fall of eighty-eight, my old man had never been so happy. He hugged me for the first time. I was eleven. (Thelonius Monk)

This one is my favorite. It packs so much tone and character into a small space — you can almost see the sepia photograph. You get everything you need to know about the relationship between the narrator and his father. It’s economical and understated. Contrast the laconic bittersweetness of this one with the emotional tempest in the next one…

Honorable Mention 1

Happily sobbing she held the boy, her memory of his violent conception falling away. She had learned to love him, this would be her revenge. (Melissa Pierce)

This one hits pretty hard and never lets up. “Happily sobbing”, “violent conception” and “revenge” are tempered by “she had learned to love him” — a triumph of will over emotion. I have to take a couple of points off for a missing comma after “sobbing” and a misplaced one in the last sentence (it should be a semicolon or a dash).

Honorable Mention 2

The priest at the funeral home asked if she had been a loving mother. The children all stared at each other. The silence spoke volumes. (Derek)

My second favorite. Death and mommy issues are always good material. At first it seemed to me that “at the funeral home” could be cut without taking anything away from the story, but I think the word “funeral” in the first sentence is necessary to set the mood.

Congratulations to all the winners! I’ll be stalking you all on Twitter soon.

Here’s my entry:

He hunched by the bar phone, randomly dialing lipstick numbers from the dingy mirror nearby. On his last quarter, a familiar voice: “Ernie?”

“A what?”

“You know, one of those rocks from space. It’s right out in my front yard. I’m lucky it missed my mailbox.”

“Joan, aren’t those things, like, dangerous? And hot and stuff?”

“Well, I heard this ripping noise, there was a flash, and then a noise like thunder. I thought there was an earthquake or someone’s gas grill had blown up or something. But I looked outside and there was this fire in my front yard, and a big hole the size of my coffee table.”

So Jared’s idea was just to take something, anything, you wrote today, pick out the best sentence or two, and throw it up there. It’s a nice compromise between posting a bunch of drivel every day and, well, never posting. So I think I’ll try that. Here’s one for today. It’s still early, so maybe this will be motivation to try and come up with something better later on.

(Bonus points if you can figure out who she is.)

Someone in a headset and clipboard was motioning at Tonya to come out to the counter. The gussied-up woman was waiting there, head tilted, studying her like a cat. “Good morning ma’am, can I get you something?”

The catlike expression vanished, replaced by a flash of annoyance and then a big, cartoonish expression of surprise. Tonya saw her glance at the nearest camera and understood. She’s playing for them. “My Dear Tonya Brown!” she pronounced. Tonya heard the capital letters.